Kevin has been on bikes since forever. I recently posted these pictures from about 23 years ago:

A few years after that, Kevin competed in his first triathlon. He was pretty young, and he did great! That’s his sister, Kelly, to his right. They did a solid kid’s event swim/bike/run.

And now he’s back to the same place, in Sylvania, Ohio, to compete in his first triathlon as an adult. Here we are before the race.

His teammate Ryan McHugh swam the 1.5 km (0.9 mile) open water swim in 18 minutes, which is an awesome time! Then Kevin biked 40 km (25 miles) in the pouring rain in 1:12, which was also remarkable! And finally, Alex Schoen ran the 10 km (6.2 miles) in 43 minutes, another super performance. They came in 2nd place by just a few minutes.

Here they are, all exhausted looking after the race.

Can you tell I’m pretty damn proud!? Alex recently lost his dad; I know he would have been very proud of Alex as well. These are three really great young guys!!!

The boys enjoyed their lego cars, chasing the cat, Gail’s bird feeders, and checking out our massage chair and the rest of our furniture!

The had a bubble bath in our jacuzzi and then cuddled up to a movie.

We went to City Lake Park in Jamestown, NC, at the recommendation of two young-mom therapists at work. (Thank you, Kelli and Robynn!) The kids enjoyed the playgrounds…

… and we rode the train and the merry-go-round!

Later, we hung out at a neighborhood pond, where the boys tried out their 25 cent, garage sale radio controlled boat, Al showed off his casting skills retrieving said boat, and I took a few pictures for Macro Monday.

It was really fun hanging out with the Columbus Crottes. The boys are a riot and my sister in law Kirsten is a dream. My little brother is doing alright!

Kevin stopped by last week with his friends on their way down to a Florida Keys fishing trip. We had a very nice pre-Father’s day dinner. Then, because he had expressed a little interest in birding, I gave him a copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America. Who knew that he would start birding so soon!

Listening to Josh Groban is one of Eric’s special interests. So Gail decided to buy tickets to a concert, and we took Eric to see his idol last night in Charlotte, NC. We had good seats. Gail and Eric got to stand about 10 feet from him for a little while. It was a very special kind of night!

I also got to meet Kelly’s boyfriend, Jason. He strikes me as a very gentlemanly young man, who served four years in the Navy, and will complete his degree in computer hardware engineering next month. They seem to be very happy together, and that makes me happy!

Yesterday, they took us on a great hike in South Mountain Park. For those of you who don’t know Phoenix, it is a city in a large valley (the Valley of the Sun) surrounded on all sides by mountains. Tempe, the suburb where you’ll find ASU and where Kelly and Jason live, is in the southeast corner of Phoenix. So the South Mountains are close to where they live.

It was a hot and dry 96 degrees in the Sonoran desert for our hike, though that is way better than the 115 degrees that it easily sees in the summer. We had a great hike up the mountains to a beautiful vantage point that allowed us to see both northward towards Phoenix and southward. Here are a few pics of my beautiful daughter and of our great hike!

At the same time, Elizabeth Taylor has died. Liz was born in 1932, my mom in 1931. I always thought they looked alike in some ways. (But my mom is way cooler!)

So here’s a little tribute to two beautiful ladies from a day gone by. What do you think?

This picture is from a couple of years ago. It is one of my favorites of my oldest daughter, Megan, and me. She is finishing her spring break, which she spent in Marco Island, FL. Two days ago she drove up the coast to spend a few hours with a friend in Savannah, then yesterday she drove up to spend an evening and overnight with us in Winston. We had a nice dinner yesterday at one of our favorite spots, 6th and Vine. It was great to catch up on all the scoop from back home. We had a nice breakfast this morning at the house, and poof, she was gone! It was a brief but wonderful visit!

I’ll share a couple of Megan stories from when she was growing up. The daily routine at our house after dinner was for the kids to work on their homework. My ex and I would help them whenever they needed it. I remember one night trying real hard to help Megan understand a simple math concept. She couldn’t get it, and would drift away, losing her focus. Then I became frustrated and lost it. I guess I said something like, “Megan, talking to you is like talking to a goddam brick wall!” Something loving like that. Well, I’ve had many opportunities to sincerely apologize for that, as Megan retells the story once in a while. Not my greatest dad moment. And we later discovered that Megan simply does not have the math chip. She is excellent with her finances and such, but she has been known to count on her fingers, if that says anything. Still, no excuses. I screwed up.

Then there was the time when Megan was a teenager that I told her I would pick her up after work. She was a clerk at a department store at the local mall. She closed the place, walked out at the appointed time of 9:30 PM to find her father not there. That was before everyone had a cell phone, so she couldn’t just call. She just waited, and stewed. I finally remembered and picked her up a little late. Not good. She said something to me like, “What part of 9:30 do you not understand!?” Well, I don’t let her forget that! We laugh about it now.

At her high school graduation, everyone was surprised when she got to wear a special stole that identified her as an honor student. They were surprised because she was such a prankster, a “cool kid,” not one of the typical brainiacs. When people asked her how she got that honor stole she said, “I stole it off a nerd.”

But she went on to the U. of Michigan, studied a semester abroad in Spain, is beautifully bilingual, and went on to finish a Masters degree and a Ph.D. When she goes back to school next week, at Heidelberg University, it is back to her job as a professor of Clinical Counseling. I guess she’s not such a brick wall after all!

I love you, Megan! You did really well, despite your father’s efforts! LOL It’s a joy and a pleasure to be with you!

One of my fears about all of this is that, although I love my father, I don’t want to turn into him. As a physician, I might understand genetics better than most. I know that many of our thoughts, feelings and behavior are driven by genetic scripts that are more powerful than we generally believe. Add to that the effect of their parental influence when we are young. We model their everything. That leaves less and less room for what we want to believe, that we are sovereign, independent, driven by our own free will. These points are driven home to me when I see not only the physical resemblances to my parents, but also to their mannerisms, emotional makeup, and such. Sure, there are differences. Some of my values clash with theirs. After all, there is the natural rebellion against our parents that is typical of the adolescent transition into our own adulthood, and often results in conflicting views of the world. And we are children of a different time and history. But still…

Well, all of this is much more serious than what I set out to write in the first place. I just don’t want to turn into my father, that’s all. I want to be me. Unique, individual me. So how do I explain my life-long fascination with photography? Let me go back in time a bit.

My father’s father was born at the end of the 1800′s. His having a camera was a remarkable thing. Picture the big boxes covered by a black cloth. Picture glass slides with photo emulsion to capture the effects of light. Picture little gizmos that metered light, something that had to be done before each and every shot, to determine the shutter speed and aperture settings in order to not waste the precious and time consuming products and process. Picture the developments in the camera, the best coming out of Germany. I can remember him hunched over his Rollei, framing his picture on the upside down/inverted image in the large but dim glass viewfinder at the top of the camera. And I can remember his darkroom, where he developed his own film.

Flash forward to my father. For some reason, he felt compelled to also have his own darkroom. He built one in every home he has ever owned, except for the retirement home they just moved into a few years ago. Mind you, my father was a workaholic and rarely, if ever, used any of these darkrooms. He also had a plethora of cameras, lenses, photography gadgets, books, boxes of slides (the oldest are made of a tin like metal), lighting systems, projectors, screens, etc, etc, etc.

So it is not surprising that I had my first camera when I was 8 or 9 years old. I can vividly remember my Kodak Brownie.

It was very simple to use, without the need to adjust settings. You just needed to know that the outdoor light was sufficient, but not too bright. Rolls were easy to install. It had a tiny little viewfinder on the top for portrait shots, and a separate one on the side for landscape shots. It also had a separate flash attachment, a big bulky thing with a huge tin bowl into which you inserted separate one-use-only bulbs. They went off with a cool pop, sometimes a little smoke with a unique odor I can still remember, and sometimes they were a total dud.

I, too, have had a long series of cameras over the years. I totally understand the relationship of light and film, shutter speed/aperture/depth of field, contrast, white balance, etc. I have developed black and white film in a darkroom, and now I use computers for post-processing digital images. I feel a warm, comfortable feeling about cameras. I drool over the latest and greatest. Why? Why do I do this?

My life’s work and life in general have kept me busy doing other things, but more recently my interest in photography has been reborn. It coincided with Gail’s interest in birding. Those two hobbies are a match made in heaven.

So, I think I’m turning into my father and grandfather, sharing their inherited or transmitted values. Maybe I’m not as unique as I think I am. But I’ll at least put my own stamp on it, using the technologies of my own time.

I’m grateful for what I have been given by my parents. I’m proud of them. They’re not perfect. Neither am I. I’m more like them than what I ever expected. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing! A great thing!